Healthcare providers and practices have an ever increasing need for accessing medical records to ensure they have the latest information or have access to information at a moments notice. Mobile communication devices continue to grow in computational power and allow a healthcare provider to access information from nearly anywhere on Earth. Unfortunately, use of a mobile device to access medical records, especially within a small healthcare practice environment, is fraught with problems.
FIG. 1 presents a typical non-mobile environment associated with a healthcare practice. The practice creates an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) installation 100 by purchasing and installing an EMR server 120 on a local area network within practice 115. EMR server 120 provides access to EMR database 125 storing the practice's medical records, which are often private records or stored in a proprietary format. Members of the practical typically access the records via one or more EMR workstations 130. EMR installation 100 lacks support for allowing mobile communication devices to gain access to EMR database 120.
Others have put forth effort toward providing access to medical records as described in the following references.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,915,240 to Karpf et al. titled “Computer System and Method for Accessing Medical Information over a Network”, filed Jun. 12, 1997, describes a system for accessing medical records very similar to the network depicted in FIG. 1.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,034,691 to Rapaport et al. titled “Adaptive Communication Methods and Systems for Facilitating the Gathering, Distribution, and Delivery of Information Related to Medical Care”, filed Jan. 25, 2002, describes a medical information distribution system where urgent information can be sent to a person that is highly mobile via a mobile phone.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,181,017 to Nagel et al. titled “System and Method for Secure Three-Party Communications”, filed Mar. 25, 2002, contemplates a system where information, including private medical records, can be sent through a third party via secured communication channels.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,630,986 to Herz et al. titled “Secure Data Interchange”, filed Oct. 27, 2000, also describes a system where data can be sent through a secured intermediate party and where queries can persist at a server until data arrives satisfying the query.
Although the above references provide useful insights into infrastructural techniques, they fail to address a number of issues that a private practice, or other non-technical data provider, encounters when attempting to provide data to a remote mobile device. One issue includes installation and maintenance of servers, firewalls, routers, software applications, or other highly complex technologies. Individuals in or members of a private practice typically lack technical skills to address managing these or other technologies. In addition, the private practice might lack sufficient funds to outsource such activities to those individuals who do have the required technical skills to deploy such complex technology. Yet another issue that must be addressed by the private practice is integration of mobile devices into their distribution system in a manner that is robust, secured, or seamless without requiring additional effort by individuals at the practice.
U.S. patent application publication 2003/0154110 to Walter et al. titled “Method and Apparatus for Wireless Access to a Health Care Information System”, filed Nov. 20, 2002, makes some progress by providing for a wireless handheld device having a persistent connection with a health care information system.
The above references fail to address the technical issues encountered by a practice when creating a viable EMR distribution installation that allows mobile devices to access an EMR database. Ideally a practice could install an EMR distribution system local to their organization where the installed system would automatically instantiate necessary communication infrastructure to support mobile access to locally stored medical records. A more desirable EMR system would not require the practice to manage web servers, firewalls, keep logs, separate mobile content, or other items while still being able to offer remote mobile devices access to private medical records.
Thus, there is still a need for electronic record distribution systems and methods.